When federal officers stormed out of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland, Oregon, earlier this month, President Donald Trump almost got the dramatic footage he’s been looking for since he began falsely claiming the city was a virtual war zone.
Instead, he got a viral video of a giant frog being pepper-sprayed.
As a protester fell to the ground during the confrontation, 24-year-old Seth Todd walked over in the inflatable frog costume he’s been wearing to ICE protests. An officer appeared to aim pepper spray directly at the costume’s bright orange air intake, located on his rear midsection.
A 14-second TikTok video of the encounter got 1.5 million likes, leading to a spate of news stories about the federal agents’ overreaction. In an interview with The Oregonian, Todd undercut the agents’ use of pepper spray even more, saying that he’s “definitely had spicier tamales.”
The Portland Frog, as he’s become known, has helped inspire other protesters to adopt a more absurdist approach to pushing back against the Trump administration’s actions. And Todd’s methods are part of a broader approach to political protest in Portland that can be traced back to Oregon’s earliest days as a state.
This history contains some hard-won lessons about political organizing that the rest of the country can use now.
Master the ‘still hunt’
Oregon’s leading suffragist in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Abigail Scott Duniway, pioneered a method she called the “still hunt,” after the hunter’s tactic of quietly stalking game. Since men’s votes were needed to win women’s equality, Duniway avoided confrontation and instead used humor to win them over. Some of her funnier lines read like they were posted on social media yesterday: “It’s odd that men feel they must protect women, since for the most part they must be protected from men,” she once said.
Make protest joyous
In the early 1900s, Portland was a hotbed for the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor group. When some Northwest cities such as Washington state’s Aberdeen and Spokane attempted to ban their organizing, the Wobblies, as they were called, would stage a free-speech fight. After calling in sympathizers from neighboring cities and states, a Wobbly would stand up in a public park to begin a speech. When that person was arrested, another would take his place, until the city jail was full of Wobblies, who would spend the night raucously singing pro-labor songs. Eventually, city leaders would rescind the bans.
Use overreaction to your advantage
In 1970, Portland was a mostly conservative working-class city, not inclined to support a Vietnam War protest. So, public support was not high when students at Portland State University — radicalized by the Kent State shooting — took over several blocks and put up barricades with jokey names such as Fort Tricia Nixon. But when a conservative mayor sent in police with helmets and batons to break up the protest, leaving 30 demonstrators and four police injured, something changed.
The following day, 3,500 people of all ages marched on City Hall to protest the violent handling of what became known as the Battle of Park Blocks. (In a brilliant countermove, the state’s Republican governor then helped stop more violence by working with a group of hippies to hold a massive music festival outside the city to draw potential protesters away from a planned visit by President Richard Nixon.)
Be memorable
By the time that George H.W. Bush was president, Portland had become a liberal hotbed. Bush faced so many protests during fundraising visits that a member of his administration reportedly dubbed the city “Little Beirut,” but one in particular stands out. During a visit by Vice President Dan Quayle, a group of students from nearby Reed College, calling themselves the Reverse Peristalsis Painters, swallowed mashed potatoes, food coloring and ipecac to vomit in red, white and blue in front of the hotel where he was staying. (Though memorable, the demonstration didn’t go entirely as planned: “Fight Club” novelist and former Portland resident Chuck Palahniuk noted in his book “Fugitives and Refugees” that the blue vomit came out more as green “so it looked like a protest against Italy.”)
Make the other side look silly
After a series of clashes involving the far-right Proud Boys during the first Trump administration, a group of Portland protesters set out to undermine a planned 2019 event. Calling themselves Pop Mob, short for popular mobilization, the group ran a mask-decorating station, held a banana costume dance party and encouraged people to dress up as the poop emoji as part of a “joyful resistance.” The goal was to make it harder for the Proud Boys to create slick online recruitment videos. “We’re not going to change their minds,” one organizer said. “But we can make sure their videos are filled with poop emojis and a lot of music.”
Portland’s current protesters have learned from this long history and embraced absurdist, nonviolent tactics to make their points and try to keep the public on their side.
Apart from the Portland Frog, other protesters have dressed up as a unicorn, peacock, dinosaur, raccoon and Cartman from “South Park.” They’ve also played Twister outside; worn clown makeup; formed a flash mob to dance the “Cha-Cha Slide;” held a “die-in” on a city bridge; danced to the “Ghostbusters” theme with a brass band; tied doughnuts to poles to “lure” ICE officers; played “Yakety Sax” over loudspeakers; and bicycled naked en masse through the city; among other things.
Jack Dickinson said the images undercut the narrative of a city under siege pushed by the Trump administration. A video of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem surveying the protests around the ICE facility from a rooftop, for instance, was intended to make Noem look heroic — an effort rather dramatically undercut by Dickinson standing below her in a chicken suit. But Dickinson said that the costumes also show the administration and its agents on the ground how residents really feel.
“What they rely on is fear,” he told Willamette Week. “So by coming out in an absurdist manner, it speaks to them, to some extent, that we’re actually not that afraid.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
